We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
The article gives cost of living pressure as the main reason for the decline in giving. Commenters in this thread on the UKPolitics subreddit also mention invasive chuggers and the fact people tend not to have cash on them these days.
The article itself continues,
Peter Grant, an expert in philanthropy at Bayes Business School, said the decline in giving also reflected a more polarised society. “Culture war” attacks mounted by rightwing politicians and media on voluntary organisations such as RNLI and the National Trust had undermined the wider legitimacy of charities among some donors.
Maybe, but far from being the victims of “attacks mounted by rightwing politicians and media”, a lot of charities seem to have been eager to volunteer for the front lines of the culture wars.
This excerpt comes from the section of the website of Oxfam International headed “What We Do”:
Decolonization is intrinsic to achieving gender justice for all. Our sector comes from an extractive colonial history – hetero-patriarchal and racist in nature. Neocolonial dynamics continue to shape our sector’s work and approaches. We will evolve into an organization that centers decolonial and feminist practice by building on our principles and initiatives to deeply integrate them into every aspect of our work.
There speaks a soldier of the culture wars. How long did they expect to keep waving their banners without anyone noticing that they had picked a side?
I believe that Oxfam does still occasionally do the “help suffering people in emergencies” thing that most of those who buy from or volunteer to work in their charity shops think is their main purpose. That’s my excuse for buying that nice scarf I saw in their window the other day, anyway. But I wonder what proportion of what I paid for that scarf went to pay the salaries of the sort of people who write “hetero-patriarchal” with a straight face. And writing guff about “neocolonial dynamics” is actually one of the less bad things some of Oxfam’s paid staff have got up to over the last few years, as can be seen by reading some of the many previous Samizdata posts about Oxfam at this link.
Added later: Here is another example of Oxfam’s enthusiastic participation in the culture wars:
Oxfam has apologised after posting an animation for Pride Month featuring a character in a “hate group” who some say resembles author JK Rowling.
The charity has denied the cartoon woman with red eyes and a “Terf” badge is based on the Harry Potter writer.
In trying to make a point about “the real harm caused by transphobia”, Oxfam said it had “made a mistake”.
Compare the pictures in that BBC article and see if you believe Oxfam when it said that “There was no intention by Oxfam or the film-makers for this slide to have portrayed any particular person or people.” I do not. In the Telegraph’s account of the same story, the resemblance is even clearer. Some smart work by the Telegraph’s picture editor has almost certainly found the very photograph of Ms Rowling which Oxfam’s cartoonist had in front of them when they drew the middle witch.
That’s taking a side. I have read several comments by people who are on the same side who acknowledge and deplore this. When you alienate half the population, don’t be surprised when they stop giving you money.
I have hesitated to post much about Ukraine lately as reliable information is hard to come by. However, the Telegram channels I have long watched on both sides, and personal contacts I have, are awash with similar reports from their own sources.
What needs to be spelled out to the politicians looking to consult people about digital ID is that you cannot have a universal digital anything until you have universal phone coverage (UK digital ID scheme to have limited use before next general election, minister says, 10 March). When the old copper phone lines are switched off, we will be cut off because no provider will invest in our area, and this is not untypical of large areas of Devon.
That means that any digital ID accessed by phone will not be available to us unless we go and park in a layby every day where we can get signal. Does Darren Jones, the prime minister’s chief secretary, even understand this point? We are not refuseniks. We just live near a hill, and so we won’t be able to do our car tax, get our medical records or anything else as things stand.
This is not a lifestyle choice either because we had a properly functioning analog TV signal as well as a landline when we moved here. We can’t give out our mobile number to anybody important because we know that the device will let us down, and we are paying the same as everyone else – have been for years.
Teresa Rodrigues
Crediton, Devon
This is a good argument against digital ID in itself and is also likely to work well in the public sphere. I welcome any blow against digital ID, and I sympathise with Ms Rodrigues, but I must acknowledge that there is a problem for libertarians here.
As the letter says, the UK’s old Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) landline phone network is in the process of being replaced. This link takes you to the government guidance page on “Moving landlines to digital technologies”. The government and the phone companies present this transition to “Digital Voice” as being un upgrade for which we should be grateful. It is not an upgrade for me and I am not grateful. Compared to some, I am not badly affected, but I have lost the convenient ability to dial six digits instead of eleven for a local number, and, more worryingly, Digital Effing Voice doesn’t work when there is a power cut, which we have fairly often. For those who live in rural areas, such as the writer of the above letter, it will be much worse. A friend of mine lives in Scotland, has very poor mobile signal at the best of times, and regularly experiences days-long power cuts due to snow. That’ll be fun when the landline doesn’t work. Next year’s papers will be full of stories about old people in isolated houses who died because they could not call for help in an emergency. This change is not being done for the benefit of the customers. It is being done because the “new digital technologies using the internet such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), Digital Voice or All-IP telephony” cost less to run than the old technologies.
What to do? If I was a socialist or a big-state Conservative, I would immediately say that the old copper phone lines must be maintained despite the expense in order to protect the vulnerable and to keep the system working in the face of attack or disaster. As a minarchist, I might be able to say the same, but given that the actual socialists in power and the big-state Conservatives who preceded them have not taken that route, when I have no doubt that they would have been happy to trumpet that they were doing so, I would guess that the extra expense of maintaining the old system must be insupportable.
Thomas Bourne, 39, an Islamic convert who uses the social media handle ‘White British Muslim’, approached the Jewish comedian, 51, last month after spotting him on an escalator.
He said: ‘I was going up the escalator and looked to my side and saw someone giving me an uncomfortable even hostile look and I realised it was Matt Lucas.
‘My instant reaction – as anyone’s would be who was going to confront someone – was to pull out my camera phone and shout “Free Palestine! Free Palestine!”
‘As a result of that video and a subsequent Daily Mail article I actually lost my job.’
As commenter “MoleUK” says on the UKPolitics subreddit,
Sounds like a totally normal thing a normal person would do. Normally.
Bellend acts like a bellend and suffers repurcussions.
Every personal interaction a chance to show one’s virtues, just gotta make sure it’s captured on camera and uploaded to social media immediately. What a miserable way to live.
The interview with Mr Bourne at the PoliticsJOE podcast, from which the Mail took the story, can be seen here. The section quoted by the Mail is excerpted right at the beginning, and the video Mr Bourne himself made is shown at 8:07 and can be seen here. The interviewer, Seán Hickey, sympathetically introduces Mr Bourne with the words, “We’re going to be talking today about an incident that you found yourself involved in” as if Mr Bourne had no choice about initially accosting Matt Lucas, filming him while shouting “Free Palestine! Free Palestine!”, confronting him further at the top of the escalator (while making a point of loudly repeating his name so everyone would know it was someone famous), continuing to follow him and argue with him despite Lucas’s non-confrontational answers, and then putting the resulting video on social media.
I do not know if London Transport has any rules against shouting at strangers you think are looking at you funny, filming them, and putting the video on social media without their consent. If it does have such rules, they were not enforced on this occasion. Mr Bourne was not punished by London Transport. Nor was he punished by the law. This is not a free speech issue. The only bad result he suffered was that his employer no longer wished to have him on their roster of fundraising consultants. I can see why Mr Bourne might not be an asset for an organisation trying to raise funds.
Due to waves of (mostly) Russian spam hitting our server, the Samizdata SmiteBot is has been grumpy for several days now beyond my ability to manually intervene every time. This means it has been shooting on sight (or maybe on site) & asking questions later. If your comment vanished, now you know why. Do not take it personally unless you are a Russian spammer, in which case take it personally.
Polanski the politician can be judged by the fact that he wants to arrest the president of Israel and build a relationship with Vladimir Putin. It becomes ever-clearer that before Polanski was a charlatan in politics he was simply a charlatan. But I am not convinced that his claim to have inflated women’s breasts by mesmerism is truly culpable. He seems to have half-believed it himself, alongside a more plausible theory that what he was actually doing was increasing the women’s self-confidence. There do not seem to have been many complaints from his customers. At some level I expect they understood that what they were buying from him was an hour with someone who would listen to them and then say soothing words. He should have stuck with his previous, more honourable profession. “With my help you can wish your boobs bigger” is less of a lie than “This time, rent control will work”.
Brian Micklethwait’s blogs fell off the internet a while back for reasons not entirely clear. Some of them I had scraped, and have now republished on the Brian Micklethwait Archive site.
The response to the Iran-Hezbollah drone attack on Britain’s Royal Air Force Base in Cyprus earlier this month has been revealing. For the first time since 1980, Britain had no warships in the eastern Mediterranean or the Gulf. Air defences were effectively absent. The UK’s main carrier strike group was still en route to Greenland. Britain ended up having to rely on Greece and France to help secure its own military base. That is not evidence of foreign capture. It is evidence of institutional incompetence.
The truth of course is that ‘Net Zero’ is an article of faith. A state religion masquerading as a moral crusade despite the evidence it is expensive, ineffective, and generally regressive.
Low carbon subsidies transfer wealth from the general population to landowners and corporations. It’s state socialism delivering a caricature of pre-Corn Laws Toryism.
I thought I saw the first few seconds of a scary video, either put out by the Home Office “Prevent” scheme or by some NGO with a similar remit. The video featured a teenage actor – white and male, obviously – portraying a boy lamenting that he had got a criminal record after impulsively posting hate speech online. I remembered the title as being something like “It just takes a few seconds to get a criminal record” or “It only takes a few words to get a criminal record”. From what little I saw of it, the video seemed more sinister than 99% of the hate speech it aimed to combat – because it was not put out by some Twitter-addled rando with thirteen followers but by His Majesty’s government, or an organisation closely associated with the same.
Ya know how it is. I just saw a second or two and thought, “I might blog about that”, but I was too busy to note it down. And now it’s disappeared. I put a query into CoPilot, which might have been unwise, and got this:
🔗 Official Home Office Video Link
🎥 “It Just Takes a Few Words to Get a Criminal Record” — UK Government (Prevent)
YouTube (Official UK Government Channel): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8hE1G9FqJw (youtube.com in Bing)
This is the authentic version of the video you’re looking for. It’s produced as part of the UK Government’s counter extremism and online safety messaging aimed at young people.
📌 What this video covers
• Warns young people that posting extremist or hateful content online can lead to:
o Arrest
o Prosecution
o A criminal record
• Uses a serious, cautionary tone
• Shows teen actors in realistic online scenarios
• Designed to discourage impulsive posting of harmful content
That “anymore” suggests it did once exist, but I am beginning to wonder if I did not hallucinate the whole thing and spur the A.I. to join in my hallucination by means of my prompts.
Assuming I did not imagine it, can I get this video back from the void? I’ve tried the Wayback Machine without success.
UPDATE: That was quick. My thanks to commenter nbc who said, “This one?”
It took me about a second of scrolling down from that post to find views expressed by Steve Laws that I strongly disagreed with. For instance, he mocks Laurence Fox for saying, in the context of the child-killer Ian Huntley being attacked and killed by another prisoner, that even the most depraved criminals should be protected from vigilante justice in prison. Steve Laws appears to be an actual far-right person. They do exist. But as I have said before, “if there is a truth respectable people shy away from mentioning, do not be surprised when the despicable people who will say it aloud are listened to.”
The video appears to have been put out by the police rather than the Home Office, and shows a boy – not “a boy” in the sense of “a young man”; a child of about thirteen – tearfully saying “I just got all my devices taken away by the police. My mum couldn’t believe it. I might get a criminal record and not be able to go to college. I only shared a link. I just thought it was funny. But it was terrorist content, and that is not a game, it’s real life.”
That is a deeply sinister message for the police to be putting out, particularly in that it is aimed at children.
COUNTER TERRORISM POLICING
A.C.T.|ACTION COUNTERS TERRORISM
WHAT YOU SHARE LEAVES A TRACE
CLICK TO FIND OUT MORE
and the caption to the Instagram video says,
Has your child spotted our latest campaign on their feed? 👀
We’ve launched a digital campaign aimed at teenage boys to highlight the real-world consequences of sharing harmful extremist content online.
The content is being promoted on platforms young people already use, to reach them where they are.
Our message is simple: sharing extremist material can lead to serious legal and life-changing consequences.
It’s not just a laugh. What you share leaves a trace.
Learn more about the campaign and the message behind it via the link in our story.
Two questions occur to me:
1) Why was the video removed from YouTube? Hostile comments?
2) Is the video an accurate portrayal of the likely “real-world consequences of sharing harmful extremist content online” when the sharer is a child and the content is something the child shares because they think it is funny? If it is not an accurate portrayal, then the police officers or police employees who made the video are deliberately frightening children with misinformation regarding the law. People have had the police turn up at their doors to issue a “friendly warning” for less. If, however, it is an accurate portrayal of the real world – that is, if children really are being given criminal records for sharing (not creating, sharing) comic memes of whose extremist origin they were unaware, then we are further along than even I thought.
The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa
Recent Comments